Friday, March 29, 2013

I recently saw a performance of
Mozart’s brilliant comic opera The Magic
Flute put on by the Utah Opera. The
Magic Flute is a favorite for opera lovers because of its remarkable
contrapuntal score and rich coloratura arias. The most famous of these arias is
the “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” or “Hell’s vengeance boils in my
heart” aria sung by the Queen of the Night. This aria requires a virtuosic
soprano able to ascend several octaves with very little breath and hit a very
rare, and very high, F6 note. It is notoriously grandiose, and I’m happy to
report that renowned soprano Audrey Luna, who was most recently in The Tempest at the Met, sang this aria
with aplomb. Take a look at the great Diana Damrau absolutely slaying this aria
here, and you’ll get an idea of how difficult this type of singing can be.

Before seeing this opera I was aware
of Mozart’s Masonic background. I knew him to be a basically observant Roman
Catholic and a member of a Roman Catholic lodge. However, I was struck by The Magic Flute’s elaborate deployment
of Egyptian symbols and signs, and the story seemed very much in accordance
with my rather limited experience in secret rituals as a former Mason. The
opera’s allegorical libretto seemed infused with esoteric messaging that I
could only speculate on. I knew that I had to investigate further.

Mozart was a member of not only a
Roman Catholic lodge but several other lodges in Austria and Bavaria. In the
course of graduating through the various rites of Freemasonry, Mozart met and
befriended the infamous founder of the Bavarian Illuminati,

The Kissinger of the 1700's

Adam Weishaupt. In
May, 1776, Weishaupt established a lodge within Freemasonry with its own
particular rites. This lodge welcomed deists, agnostics, and atheists alike.
The Illuminati focused on man’s potential and insisted that if mankind was
meaningfully governed by a secret clique of wise, enlightened men within the
order then a utopia of peace and happiness on earth could be established.
Weishaupt’s ambition was none other than the covert takeover of governments in
Europe and around the world by initiating the rich and powerful into his order
and making them pledge allegiance to his cause of benevolent autocracy. This is
merely the continuance of the proto-fascist visions of Plato and Rousseau that
called for a new order of the ages controlled by a secretive inner coterie of
philosopher kings.

In the 1780’s Mozart grew to
prominence quickly within the Illuminati owing to his international celebrity.
Along the way he aggressively recruited other members into the order including
his father and the composer Joseph Haydn.

On its surface The Magic Flute is the story of a handsome young prince, Tamino,
and his sidekick, Papageno, who wish to gain entrance into a magical order and
be united with their future brides. In order to join this benevolent order
dedicated to wisdom, rationality, and harmony the two characters must overcome
a series of trials and maintain their faith in the order to protect them from
danger. They must outwit the forces of darkness commanded by the Queen of the
Night if they are ever to attain entrance into the sacred brotherhood and get
the girl.

Aside from being shot through with
Masonic ideology, another interpretation of The
Magic Flute is that it is a bildungsroman; an allegory for maturation and
the development of human sexuality. Tamino wishes not only to attain the
knowledge of the sacred rites of the Temple of Sarastro; he also wants to attain
knowledge in the biblical sense by wedding and bedding Pamina, the beautiful
daughter of the Queen of the Night. Papageno represents the goyim, the
uninitiated man, who only wishes to gratify his senses. This means that
Papageno can be only partially initiated into the rite as a means of fulfilling
his sexual imperative. He can discover carnal knowledge through ritual, but
because he remains attached to the senses he cannot become a full-fledged
member of the order. According to Enlightenment era Masonic philosophy sensual
perception stands apart from reason and rationality. So, Papageno cannot enter
into the secret society led by the wise and charismatic sorcerer, Sarastro.

Tamino and Papageno are each given a
magic flute and magic bells respectively by Sarastro’s followers. The acolytes
promise the two adventurers that they will be protected from harm if they play
the instruments. According to Masonic doctrine, music played a certain way can
be used to subdue the dark side of man’s nature and enhance man’s faculty for
reason and virtue. This, no doubt, was one of the reasons that Mozart became
interested in Freemasonry in the closing years of his life. Entrance into the
order meant access to an occulted musical tradition that few composers would
ever know about. The Magic Flute incorporates
Masonic music throughout but particularly in the opening overture, which relies
heavily on the melodic restatement of three notes; three being a significant
number in Freemasonry.

The sexual double entendre of these
magical instruments in the opera should not be overlooked. The instruments are
played by the adventurers not just to keep them out of danger and lead them to
the temple of knowledge, but also to lead them to their brides who will confer
upon them the knowledge of the flesh. The flute, carried by Tamino, is a
stand-in for the penis. The bells, carried by his sidekick Papageno, are a
stand-in for testicles. A boy is led to his sexual awakening by manipulating
and masturbating his instrument, his penis. Similarly, Tamino must play with
his flute and Papageno his bells if they are to awaken their libidinal desires
that will put them on the hunt for eligible mates. The very name of the opera
is a sexual joke, immortalizing the cock as a sacred totem. This is well within
the standard of Mozart’s other ribald comic operas and reflects the eighteenth
century tradition of picaresque.

The
Magic Flute seems to also treat the nature of masculinity and its relation
with the feminine. Sarastro encourages Tamino to keep the secrets of the order
a secret from the uninitiated, but especially from women. He also encourages
him not to spend too much time with women or allow women to occupy too much of
his thoughts, lest his faculty for reason and intellect become impaired. Tamino
must rescue Pamina from her mother, The Queen of the Night, who is an
irrationally violent and vengeful shrew. Tamino must have faith in the order of
Sarastro and the magic flute to achieve this task. His quest is to release
Pamina from the bondage of spiritual darkness and superstition that she lives
in with her mother, and initiate her into the lightness of good and reason that
will be their marriage. In this context, masculinity can be seen as the oldest and
most nefarious of secret societies in which boys are initiated into the order
of men whose conspiracy is to seduce and abduct girls from their homes and
their mothers and enlist them into the order of women who will fulfill the
rites of wives and mothers. The oedipal conflict is dramatized. Maturation is a
journey guided by libido whose object is independence from the family and the
foundation of a fully realized sexuality with a monogamous partner.

Relax. I'm a sorcerer.

The character Sarastro may represent
several different people. The first and most obvious possibility is that he
represents Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, the prophet and founder of the first
monotheistic religion in ancient Iran. Zarathustra, along with other religious
founders, is a prominent figure in Freemasonry. Another possibility suggested
by Katherine Thomson is that Sarastro represents Mozart’s friend Ignaz von
Born. Born was a famous metallurgist and probable alchemist who initiated
Mozart into the Illuminist lodges. Still another and most compelling
possibility is that Sarastro represents the charismatic and mysterious adventurer,
Count Cagliostro.

While accounts of Cagliostro’s life vary
widely he is believed to have been a grifter and occultist of low birth who rose
to the level of aristocrat and international celebrity in the eighteenth
century due to his powerful associations among the Bavarian Illuminists. Mozart
would have no doubt heard of Cagliostro and may have had occasion to meet him,
though there are no accounts of this. Cagliostro was a conjurer who developed a
specific rite within Freemasonry known as the Egyptian Rite. This is a rite
that makes use of various Egyptian symbols and cosmology, particularly the
cults of Isis and Osiris who are mentioned throughout The Magic Flute. The opera takes place in an Egyptian, Middle Eastern,
or Near Eastern setting very similar to the regions invoked in the Egyptian
Rite.

In Cagliostro’s séances that he
performed for his Illuminist friends and their various hangers-on, Cagliostro
would wear a turban and an iridescent cape, not unlike Sarastro. He would summon
two virginal youths, a boy and a girl around a crystal globe of clarified water
and he would describe their destinies and perform various miracles, according
to Masonic lore. This is very close to the story of The Magic Flute. Sarastro summons two virginal youths, Tamino and
Pamina, to join him in his temple. If they trust in the sorcerer then no harm
will befall them and they will each discover one another and fulfill their
destiny to be married.

It is quite possible that Cagliostro
was a key figure in The Affair of the Diamond Necklace. This is an event that
eventually led to the French Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI. It is
almost indisputable that the Illuminati were instrumental in the French
Revolution and that their senior members presided over the subsequent Reign of
Terror. An excellent late eighteenth century account of these events can be
found in Abbé Barruel’s “Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism.”
Cagliostro was formerly charged and convicted for his collusion in the affair,
but was later acquitted.

The official story of The Diamond
Necklace Affair is that Marie Antoinette commissioned some jewelers to make an extravagant
diamond necklace worth over 20,000 livres directly from taxes collected from
the French people. This enraged the people of France when it was discovered and
thus eased the way for a coup orchestrated by the Jacobins, a franchise of the
then disbanded Bavarian Illuminati.

However, according to Henry Evans’s
official Masonic book “Cagliostro and the Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry” it was
Cagliostro who presented the necklace to the powerful French nobleman, Cardinal
de Rohan. De Rohan’s lover was a grifter and a prostitute who finagled her way
into Marie Antoinette’s court. It was she that discovered the commissioning of
the necklace and leaked its existence to authorities. Is Henry Evans suggesting
that The Diamond Necklace affair was a frame-up orchestrated by Cagliostro, de
Rohan, and the Jacobins? Could this event have been an elaborate false-flag
operation to undermine the throne and pave the way for the French Revolution?
Is The Magic Flute meant to
memorialize Cagliostro and the Egyptian Rite? Is it meant to be propaganda
worshipping the Illuminists and the Jacobins who were the wicked architects of
the French Revolution; the very same puppet masters who were, by 1791,
administering the Reign of Terror against the French people?

Freedom has arrived.

The
Magic Flute is regarded today as an arch masterpiece of high culture, but
we must see it for what it was originally meant to be. This was a pop-culture
phenomenon that was meant for mass consumption and designed to have mass
appeal. The opera exploits many cultural fads that existed in 1791. The
Egyptian setting would have appealed to the cultural fascination with extinct
empires as popularized by Marmontel’s novel The
Incas. Yet, although meant to cater to the lowest common denominator, The Magic Flute also contains occult music,
numerous symbols, and references that would have only been visible to the
Illuminati clique of insiders. It was none other than Goethe, a fellow Illuminist,
who had this to say of The Magic Flute
“It is enough that the crowd would find pleasure in seeing the spectacle; at
the same time its high significance will not escape the initiates.” One can only
wonder if there are any 21st century spectacles meant for mass
consumption that might also have occulted significance to those who have been initiated
into the dark mysteries.